Amandla Stenberg on Meeting Beyoncé and Her Journey to Loving Her Hair

For Glamour’s September issue, we photographed 55 incredible women across America and asked them to define themselves. The results were brilliant, funny, and inspiring—read them all here[link to gallery]—and create a stunning portrait of what it is to be a woman in America today. (As our editor-in-chief puts it: “We’re all unicorns.”) Here, Amandla Stenberg discusses filming Lemonade, self-image, and the Black Girl Magic movement.

GLAMOUR: What does it mean to be a woman in 2016? What does it really mean to you?

AMANDLA STENBERG: My conception around being a woman in 2016 has definitely been shifting over the past year, because I feel like I’m proud of womanhood, and I feel attached to it, and at the same time I'm someone who doesn't

believe in having a gender binary, and so often times I separate those two concepts in my mind—the concept of being a woman and the concept of being a girl or being female, being kind of attached to a certain gender identity. So now I'd say my relation to being a woman is, I mean being a woman is whatever you want because the concept of gender is not really real, you know? And so for me it's about being comfortable in myself. It's about allowing myself to express who I am in any way that I want to, whether that be through my clothing, the way I present myself to the world, whether that be through like my gender identity and my pronouns. It's just really about allowing yourself to really be expressive and creative.

GLAMOUR: What's the best piece of advice you'd give to every girl and woman reading Glamour?

AS: I think the best piece of advice that I would give is beauty is really just—I know it sounds cheesy—being true to who you are. Beauty is not something that is acquired necessarily through like makeup or clothing. The thing that makes makeup or clothing or fashion beautiful is the fact that the person wearing them loves themselves and loves being able to kind of use them as artistic tools. And so if I was to give one piece of advice, it would be to find beauty in your core first before you go out into the world and find it in other ways.

GLAMOUR: If you could re-write the first line of your Wikipedia page, what would it say?

AS: Oh god—okay. Amandla Stenberg is a social activist and artist and a lover of the 2007 emo scene as well as Trader Joe's cookies.

GLAMOUR: Perfect. You exude natural confidence for someone so young. Do you have any mentors?

AS: I have so many mentors. I'm really lucky to be surrounded by incredible mentors, whether it be Solange or Gloria Steinem or Ava DuVernay, there are so many awesome people in my life, and so I'm lucky for them to kind of have fostered my identity as I grow into myself. But also, there are tons of mentors in my really personal life—like my mom or my sisters, my friends—that have given me so much love that I feel comfortable enough to be who I am, 'cause they've kind of built me up and supported me and also grounded me at the same time.

GLAMOUR: How do you think you have it easier than young stars who came before you, and how do you think you have it harder?

AS: I think I have it easier because of the Internet. The internet has allowed me to just be authentically myself, as opposed to having to perpetuate a certain image, and so I'm lucky that I don't have to fit into a certain box. I think that can also be the downfall at the same time in what's really difficult about being kind of in the public eye right now is you have so much exposure through the Internet, and you can receive a lot of comments, and you get kind of immediate gratification, but also immediate response from people that can either be negative or positive. But I'm really thankful for the internet because it's allowed me to connect with people so much more easily.

GLAMOUR: What is your relationship with your hair and how has it changed since you were a young girl?

AS: Oh man. I've gone through so many different hair stages. My first stage was when I was younger, and I thought my hair was too big, so I always kept it in this giant poof on top of my head. I wasn't that great at doing ponytails, and so it was always really messy, and after that, as I kind of hit puberty and went to middle school and everything, I started doing things to make it smaller and straighter. I got Keratin treatments, and then I had bangs that I straightened every day. It was awful. It was like frying the front part of my hair off. And I was basically doing anything to make it look straight, and then I came to the realization that I—because of the internet honestly, because of seeing people on the internet post pictures with their natural hair, I realized like, "Oh, wait, this is actually so cool. Why have I been fighting this component of myself for so long?" And so I chopped it all off and slowly grew it back in its natural state, and now I love it. And I still have moments once in a while where I feel the need to conform, but that's also not really my—those are not my original ideas, like I don't really feel that inside. It's just when you look around and you see people with straight hair in media, you kind of feel the need to fit in, so it's kind of a constant battle loving my hair. It's something that I'm continuously working on.

GLAMOUR: How would you want to change the definition of what it means to be all-American?

AS: Let me think. All-American. I mean, I think one of the core ideas in America has always been conversation and being able to question our systems of government, and being able to dictate our own communities and how we want this country to work. And I feel like we're losing part of that because of the way that even our current political campaign is centered more around celebrity than anything else, and so we're kind of losing conversation. We're still having conversations, but they seem to be more about like Donald Trump's hair and like memes of his face more than anything else. I do think that my generation is really smart and wants to have these conversations, and so I hope that we can continue spreading our ideas and being able to change how our systems work. So, I guess being an all-American to me is being someone who questions things.

Amandla Stenberg and Rowan Blanchard on set for Glamour's September 2016 issue.

GLAMOUR: What do you hope the Black Girl Magic movement achieves this year?

AS: I hope that kind of this movement centered around black women becomes more inclusive because there is a lot of colorism within the movement that even I benefit from, and so I hope it's more inclusive of dark-skinned women. I hope it's more inclusive of sex workers. I hope it's more inclusive of girls who haven't gone natural and still have straight hair, wear weaves, I hope it's inclusive of all kind of different representations of blackness instead of one that's become more mainstream, that's become more acceptable, you know.

GLAMOUR: What was the process of filming Lemonade in total secret like, and how did your fans react to your incredible cameo?

AS: Filming Lemonade was f'ing crazy. [Laughs] Was trying not to curse. It was a literal dream. I just kind of got this phone call—it was like, "Go to New Orleans; Beyoncé wants you there." Didn't really know the context or what was going to happen, but I wasn't going to pass down that opportunity. And so I flew to New Orleans and stayed at this hotel, and in the morning got on this tour bus, and on the tour bus were all of Beyoncé's back up dancers and also like Zendaya and really awesome black women, and I started to kind of pick up the theme of what it was and how it was going to go down. And so Zendaya and I kind of sat next to each other and like gossiped about what would happen, like we were so excited, we were kind of whispering in each other's ears…And so then we get to the set, and Beyoncé comes up to me, and she goes, "Hello, Amandla. I just wanted to tell you I want Blue to be just like you," and I felt like the hands of God were like gently caressing my entire body and soul, like I felt like I had reached nirvana, and I was like, "Thank you very much." I think I said something really lame and gushing about her to her face [laughing]. But then we started shooting and it was really a powerful experience because we were shooting on this former slave plantation, and being in that space, like reclaiming that space, in an empowering way, where we were creating art that services and like promotes the beauty of people of color was really trippy. Me and Zendaya had the task of climbing up this ladder into this tree that was very far off the ground, and we were wearing these like petticoats that were so long, like dragging on the ground and heels, and we had to climb up these ladders, and we were joking with each other, we were like, "If this is how we die, that's okay." [Laughing]. It's okay because we're at a Beyoncé shoot, and we could die for her, and it’d be fine, but we ended up sitting up on that branch for a couple hours, and we like really had to pee, and our legs were going numb, but we were just like blissed out [laughing]. Anyways, yeah, then I got back home, and I wasn't allowed to tell anyone about it. I told my sister, and that was it. And people—when I went to school, and people were talking about Beyoncé and kind of, talking about when she was going to drop her album and what it was going to be about and when Formation dropped and everyone was talking about how it was kind of reminiscent of like the Black Panthers and how it was definitely making a statement, I had this secret because on set I saw what the point of it was. I saw Beyoncé and her backup dancers working on Formation, like in their down time, so that was mind-blowing. Anyways [laughing].

GLAMOUR: And how did your fans react once they saw you in the cameo, in the video?

AS: People went crazy when they saw me and especially me and Zendaya together because it was such a powerful moment of like black girls all dirty and connection and like love, and so I saw a lot of—I got a lot of tweets and inboxes like, "Oh, gee, Queen, you slayed me" [laughing] or people being really heartfelt and saying like, "That was so important for me to see. It’s so important to see you being someone who is kind of writing, creating, contributing to the narrative of black women in America."